Morality At Heart Of Mary Gordon's 'Men And Angels'

June 2, 1985|By Reviewed by Dan Cryer, Newsday

Men and Angels is Mary Gordon's first novel that is not about Catholics. But as it is a Mary Gordon novel, the book is very much about goodness and mercy.

Like her two previous books, Final Payments and The Company of Women, Men and Angels explores, with the acuity of a far more experienced novelist, the moral choices that define relationships among families, spouses and friends.

By refusing to accept the idea that forces beyond our control make choice meaningless, Gordon insists that morality matters. For a system of morality assumes that we have the freedom to make good or bad choices.

By writing about these concerns in the clearest and steadiest of styles, Mary Gordon has become, at 35, one of America's pre-eminent novelists of morals.

Only one of the characters in Men and Angels, Laura Post, a young woman working as a mother's helper, places religion at the center of her life.

But as an older and wiser character notes, even Laura, an evangelical Protestant, misses the essential message of Christianity that every human being is ''greatly beloved'' by God.

Laura's employer, the book's main character, is Anne Foster. The 38-year- old mother of two children, she's also an art historian preparing a catalog for an exhibition in New York of the works of a (fictional) neglected painter of the early 20th century, Caroline Watson.

Anne lives in a Massachusetts college town, where her husband, Michael, now on sabbatical in France, teaches French. Laura's care of Peter, 9, and Sarah, 6, gives Anne the time to pursue a career that has languished despite a Harvard Ph.D.

Although Anne is not a religious person in the conventional sense, both she and Laura wrestle, in different ways, with the questions: Does my goodness, or lack of it, entitle me to be greatly beloved? And should I offer love in return?

The pursuit of goodness, of course, is no simple matter. Because of previous misfortunes, Laura fears that she has heeded only the second half of the biblical injunction to ''be wise as serpents and innocent as doves.''

In leading the good life, which she defines largely as the saving of souls, Laura is determined to call upon the guile she naively believes to be wisdom. Similarly, Anne worries that townspeople's perception of her as a ''good person'' prevents them from seeing her as a competent professional as well.

As Anne studies Caroline Watson's diaries and letters, Anne's esteem deepens for this vigorous American who lived in France among male peers whose fame would outstrip hers.

Anne admires her persistence, as the artists' work attracts critical praise over the years and Caroline's own canvases of women, children and landscapes -- richly partaking of many styles and not limited to a single school -- are dismissed as too ''feminine,'' too ''domestic'' to be taken seriously.

As a woman, Anne has no illusions about the importance of gender in the making of artistic reputations. For women's bodies shape their lives and careers in ways that men's bodies never do.

''The truth of the matter,'' Anne believes, ''was that for a woman to have accomplished something, she had to get out of the way of her own body. . . .

''Stupidly, like the watchers of soap operas, people who were interested in the achievements of women wanted the grossest facts: Whom did they sleep with? Did they have any babies? Were their fathers kind to them, cruel to them? Did they obey or go against their mothers? Infantile questions, yet one felt one had to know. It gave courage, somehow.''

As a mother, though, Anne is disappointed by Caroline's lack of love for her illegitimate son, Stephen, who died in his 20s.

''No one,'' Anne reflects, ''would ever know the passion she Anne felt for her children. It was savage, lively, volatile. It would smash, in one minute, the image people had of her of someone who lived life serenely, steering always the same sure, slow course.

''As it was, as they would never know, she was rocked back and forth, she was lifted up and down by waves of passion: of fear, of longing, and delight.''

Anne has been granted access to Caroline's private papers by Stephen's widow, a medieval historian. Jane Watson, like her mother-in-law, is an independent woman who has pursued her career with single-minded devotion.

Her prickly personality protects her from the assaults of fate but, a friend notes, makes an encounter with her ''like a swim in a rough ocean.''

In their encounters with each other, all these women are as likely to misunderstand as to embrace each other.

For Mary Gordon, whether they can attain the condition of being ''greatly beloved'' is as central as the more obvious issues of balancing the demands of womanhood, motherhood and work.

Laura, for instance, who grew up in a loveless home, is desperate for Anne's affection. When Anne gives her a birthday party (after Laura has lied about her date of birth), a delighted Laura repays her with an expensive Christmas gift.